Great news! Have been holding off buying a hardware preview card and this will help me make my decision. A question, though. What product, AJA or Black Magic, would you guys recommend for: printing to Beta SP/DigiBeta/HDCam, real-time preview of HD content, XLR audio out and stability and ease-of-use with Vegas 8? Right now I'm leaning toward the BM Multibridge.

Hi There. I also have been checking the BlackMagic site, every day for the last 6 months or so. WIth regards to the AJA vs BM, Whilst waiting for the drivers, I was tempted to an AJA card, and had the opportunity to try one out, My first impressions were very good, but after more testing the audio was out of sync with the picture by a good 2 seconds, and although I contacted there techinical support I got not response. ALthough on the other foot I have been asking BM technical support when these drivers they have released today would come out and there response to me was ¨Your guess is as good as mine¨, so to be fair both there technical support departments need some serious work.

I also had serious issues with printing to tape and capturing with both solutions under Vegas until these new drivers come out

So my final summation is, with these new drivers, it has trnasformed the BM cards, and I would now fully recommend the BM cards, I have a MultiBridge Pro, an Intensity Pro and because of these drivers today ordered a new Decklink Extreme card for our 3rd Edit suite.

I today did a test of captuing from DigiBeta to the timeline in 10bit with timecode, and then printed this back to the original tape in a 10bit setting, the frames dropped back in the perfect position on the tape (with a small bit of delay tweaking,). The preview facility is also great, I use the Multibridge and am connected to an HD JVC monitor, by HD-SDI, I get realtime BEST FULL 1920 x 1080 25fps, in perfect HD-SDI to my monitor. If i set the project to HDV 1440x1080 25fps and use HDV footage I also get full frame rate 1080 best full HD output, the key to the BM cards or AJA is to make sure that the Project settings match the footage settings which match the output settings, then everything will be perfect. The only thng that seems to be missing at the moment is the ability to set the BM cards to output 1280x720 in any PAL formats 25 or 50 fps (typical, but you get used to it in PAL land).

XLR outputs depend on the card or box you go for, as I mentioned I use the Multibridge Pro box, which does give me XLR outputs, and they are great within Vegas, the only thing to be aware is that not all programs can use the BM Audio outputs as a windows Audio Device.

The other card we use at our suites, is the Intensity Pro card, and I have to say if you just need a good preview card then this is great, It outputs HD or SD component and also HDMI, it also works great in Vegas

Anyway I hope all this helps.

Matt

Matt,
are you certain you're getting 10bit right through that pipeline?
With Ppro you get a choice of capturing in 8 or 10 bit. I've never seen that option in Vegas's capture utility.
I was capturing with Ppro in 10bit YUV but had no way to know if Vegas was feeding that correctly into and out of its 32bit pipeline. Probably not too big an issue working with DB but with SP could be very desirable.

Bob.

I'm trying to figure out the main reason why people use the BlackMagic card... for real-time HDV preview or for HDMI capture? If this is the case, doesn't it answer the problem people are having with Vegas & real-time preview in http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=593086This Post[/link]?

Regarding capture, if I've already taped footage onto tapes in my V1U, the BlackMagic isn't going to improve my 1440 x 1080, correct? It seems that it would only improve my capture footage if I captured via BlackMagic directly onto a hard drive.

Capturing HDMI via the Intensity isn't going to improve stuff that is already recorded to tape. The HDMI output from the V1, however, is 1920x1080. So, on tape playback, the V1 converts the 1440x1080 HDV to 1920x1080 and spits it out as an uncompressed bitstream. The Intensity can record this bitstream as YUV or compressed MJPEG. The advantage of this would be having a MJPEG intermediate file, but it isn't going to look any better than HDV off-tape. The damage was done during HDV encoding and recording that to tape.

Now, the advantage of the Intensity is when when recording live video from the V1 or any other camcorder equipped with HDMI out. The V1 outputs uncompressed 1920x1080 4:2:2 video from the camera via HDMI. This can look really good, but sometimes it's impractical to haul around a desktop computer with the Intensity in it. (Although, I do this a lot.) Now, if Blackmagic made an Intensity that could plug into an Express Card slot on a laptop, then we'd really have something!

Heh heh:

http://www.getcatalyst.com/board_pic/pcie2exp.jpg

Catalyst makes a PCIE adapter that fits into the PC card slot on a laptop. At $275, it's a little too expensive for my taste . People have tried this with the Intensity and it does work.

Matt, thank you thank you for the extensive reply: almost a review! That's exactly what I wanted to know. Looks like the Multibridge Pro is what I need. This is going to make such a huge difference in our workflow. Does your company have a site? I would love to know more about anyone relying so heavily on Vegas and SCS; we've used it on two features now.

People use BlackMagic or AJA cards largely for the SDI features, I think. For example, the beta SP deck, the DV deck, and the DVCPro HD decks where I work all have SDI outputs, so everything could be digitized or printed to/from these decks over SDI. Otherwise, we could take the component output of the SP deck into the card and digitize it at that point.

For FCP users, for example, they can ingest just about anything and write all of it to disk in one master format like prores.

rob mack

I sure wish we had a compact master format in Vegas like FCP's ProRes and Avid's DNxHD....

This can be a big time saver, and allow for better output quality.

Interesting discussion, but...
With tapeless acquisition being the future (and already present in the form of P2, SxS, and other cheap flash cards present in both lower-end camcorders and the high-end recorders like the Flash XDR) - what we really need in Vegas is a preview accelerator.

All those cards are pretty expensive (especially AJA), and most of the value is in the capture side which is not interesting to me at all.

Of course, I realize Vegas would have to be re-written to take advantage of any hardware playback acceleration, and I guess SCS is not going to do it, because CPUs are faster and faster all the time...

The capture side is not the main reason for this although for legacy formats it's pretty important.

SDI remains the industry standard for feeding monitors.
The cards are petty cash compared to the monitors and VCRs.

Bob.

True about SDI, Bob.

Funny thing is that some people pay a lot for cards with SDI output, only to pay even some more for SDI -> HDMI / DVI converters :)

One of the reasons for the SDI thing is you can get scopes of various flavours to monitor what's going down the SDI cable. You cannot get that with HDMI. So although it seems stupid to go from a PC to SDI to a box to feed HDMI to a monitor the ability to measure signal against a known standard can be very important.

Also one troubling thing I'm yet to really get to the bottom of is it seems many monitors have a signficant delay on their DVI/HDMI inputs of 4 to 6 frames. Now that doesn't matter when your watching a movie and it probably would matter too much when editing as you can delay the audio to keep sync. However it'd drive you nuts in live production. Imagine trying to focus while looking at the monitor or track moving talent.

The HD SDI monitors are supposed to have less than 1 frame delay from what's on the input to what's on the screen. I guess again you get what you pay for.

Bob.

Hi Bob.

10bit capturing I know, I was surprised by this addition as well, there is now an option, inside Vegas's SDI capture utility to select 8 bit or 10 bit.

I must admit I didn't scope test everything, but it sure looked right to me.

Matt

Hi Mark

Our video department mainly does corporate video work, but we have a lovely set-up for editing, we have 3 online suites each with an 8 core MacPro's all running XP64 with 8GB ram each, and now all with BM cards, all connected to JVC HD CRT's, and all connected by a SAN Backbone to a 6TB Fibre Raid storage. 95% of all of our editing is with Sony Vegas, We shoot pretty much everything on Sony EX1's and everything is edited at 1920x1080, the SAN was the greatest addition to our workflow, I use MetaSAN for controlling the data, (Which we sell if anyone wants it) and having three identical systems and being able to share data, projects, even at the same time is amazing.

I haven't had time to install our latest addition, but we have also just got an IBM Blade Center (which we also sell), which I am going to rig for Network rendering for the suites.

Anyway you are more than welcome to check us out we are www.freehand.co.uk, just forgive the website, we are redesigning at the moment.

Matt

Matt, that sounds somewhat similar to what we are doing at work, but we're on ppro/axio systems. Otherwise similar, three+ edit stations, central storage SAN, fibrechannel and sdi distribution to the edit machines. It'd be great if you guys could write up case studies of things, and maybe SCS could actually be involved. They could definitely use some articles on their site to outline this sort of setup.

Rob Mack

Megabit,

You could say that Vegas needs hardware to decode and playback footage, and I think that it's very true that SCS needs to rethink how Vegas handles playback (Vegas degrades the framerate, other systems degrade quality. Is one preferable to another?)

There is another way to look at this. MPEG2 and AVC encoding will always incur more CPU overhead than a less compressed encoding, so maybe rather than special hardware decoders it'd be mo' better to have higher capacity storage with more throughput. What if a camera could use solid state cards with, say, gigabytes of capacity and 100+ megabytes of throughput? In other words, use codecs that don't need hardware decoders.

That's another hardware solution. Not something you'll see today, but you don't see any hardware accelerators for Vegas at this time anyway, so why not just hope for better camera solutions. You can build a big enough, fast enough storage solution for your computer but cameras need better tapeless storage.

Rob Mack

There are a handful of good reasons for SDI:
--professional monitoring including scopes
--integrates with existing infrastructure (if your facility has been around a while and is modestly developed -- you've got heterogeneous sources all equipped with SDI)
--can work as a universal canopener (assuming all your media comes in cans - can be output over SDI)
--another point not brought up is that SDI supports very long cable runs - isn't it something like 100 meters?

Having said all that, SDI isn't necessarily appropriate for individuals with one or two edit stations. If you actually build up a facility to the point that you need SDI, you'll know you need it.

Rob Mack

Do any of you Intensity Pro users find BMD's capture utility "Media Express" hard or impossible to use?

I just installed the card, did some capturing at home and found it clunky and slow, but usable. Packed up computer etc and went to a co-worker's to capture some Beta tapes, and Media Express just plain would not respond--unless you call locking up cold a response. Wasted a whole day for bupkis.

I use Media Express exclusively for capture. I haven't had any trouble whatsoever. I'm not sure what the problem may be.

I've got an email into BMD tech support, and their phone number. See what that does.

Great news - I've been years waiting for accurate sdi i/o.
What version of vegas are people using this on V7 or V8?

I'm keen to know if these drivers work on V7.0??